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SPEEO H 




HON. JAMES W. WALL, OF N. J., 



MISSOURI EMANCIPATION BILL, 



DELIVERED IN THE 



UNITED STxiTES SENATE, FEBRUARY 7th, 1863. 




WASHINGTON : 

M'GILL & WITHER0V7, PRINTERS. 
1863. 



SPEECH. 



Mr. WALL said : 

Mr. President : I desire, before the vote is taken on thie 
bill, to give my reasons why I shall be constrained to vote 
in the negative. I have listened to the arguments advanced 
here in favor of the passage of this bill, and I have read with 
care the very able and eloquent speech of my friend, the 
Senator from Missouri, on my left; and nothing that I have 
heard or read has served to shake my convictions of the un- 
constitutionality and inexpediency of this bill before the 
Senate. 

But whatever may be my own individual convictions upon 
the subject, I believe, nay, sir, I know that a large majority 
of the people of !N"ew Jersey are opposed to the passage of 
this bill upon those very grounds. In fact, sir, resolutions 
upon the subject have already been introduced into the lower 
house of my Legislature by a distinguished member from 
Bergen county, that go a step beyond this and hint at repu- 
diation of a debt incurred for any such illegitimate purpose 
as this. 

My people, as I think very justly, conceive that you have 
as much right to appropriate the moneys belonging to the 
Federal Government, to purchase the slaves in the barra- 
coons on the African coast, as to appropriate it to pay for the 



slaves belonging to the slaveholders of Missouri. If the 
State of Missouri, in her own way, and at her own cost, 
choose to emancipate her slaves, the people of New Jersey 
would not have the slightest objection, as they would recog- 
nize in such action the true constitutional mode, which their 
fathers followed when they wished to rid themselves of an 
institution that, in progress of time, had become- an in- 
cumbrance. 

The bill not only provides for the emancipation of the 
slaves of Missouri, but proposes to put the people of the 
other States under the grinding harrow of taxation in order 
to pay for the slaves, a proposition so monstrous and abnor- 
mal that I wonder it does not strike Senators on the other 
side of the Chamber with alarm at the consequences to flow 
from such an act. But their sensibilities seem blunted, their 
minds darkened, and their judgments clouded, whenever a 
question arises involving the interests of the black race. 
Are you anxious. Senators, that the epitaph should be writ- 
ten over the tomb of the Republic: "Here lies a white na- 
tion, which lost its liberties and its name in endeavoring to 
give freedom to the black and inferior race?" If you are 
not, your conduct, day after day, is in strong correspondency 
with a policy that must inevitably bring this Republic to its 
grave, and write upon its tomb this horrid epitaph. 

In the midst of civil war, with men's hearts failing them 
for fear, and for looking after the terrible things the future 
seems to have in store, can you not find something else to 
occupy your legislative time than in devising and maturing 
schemes so monstrous and repulsive as this? Do you desire 
to excite revolution at the North ? For I tell you here, frank- 
ly and fearlessly, that, if you will only listen, your startled 
eat-s shall catch the muttering thunder. If you go on and 



persist in measures like this, and others that are soon to be 
before you, you will hear it nearer and nearer, louder and 
louder, as it rolls above your heads, and then will come the 
lightning flash — the crash of what remains of the Union, and, 
perchance, we shall be driven to accept a military despotism 
to escape anarchy. Can you. Senators, be willing to accept 
such a dread alternative, simply that you may carry out your 
fanatical abstractions in reference to slavery ? Is it by pass- 
ing such bills, as full of mischief to the Republic as the bellj 
of the Trojan horse to Ilium, that you are providing for the 
common defence and promoting the general welfare ? 

I represent on this floor the people of a loyal State. They 
have poured out their blood and their treasure without stint 
iu this terrible contest; and they have done so, sir, because 
they believed it to be a war for the Union under the Con- 
stitution; or, to use the more forcible and pertinent language 
of my colleague, expressed in a resolution ottered by him ia 
this body, in 1861, they believed thai the presc?ii war ivas for 
the Union according to the Constitution ; that its object was to save 
the former and enforce the latter ; icas so in the /)e(/imnn(/, is now 
as carried on, and should be to the last; that measures extreme and 
radical, disruptive in themselves, involving in a common fate as well 
the logal as dislogcd States, should not be resorted to, and that in 
crushing treason, wide-spread and baneful as it is, the Government 
itself cannot prove a traitor to organic law. 

This, sir, was the sentiment, I believe, that animated our 
soldiers and sent them to the field, and caused them to man- 
ifest a zeal, a devotion, and a courage that have seldom, if 
ever, been equalled, certainly never surpassed. They have 
ever borne the fiercest shock of the battle, and when thej 
fell, have fallen 

"With their backs to the field, and their feet to the foe." 



They have written the names of all the bloodiest battles 
of the Peninsula, at Roanoke, and in front of Washington, 
high upon their standards. They have won the well-de- 
served admiration of the country, and bravely earned the 
tribute that the present commander, " Fighting Joe Hooker," 
awarded to them — "That he found no troops that he would 
sooner lead into action, or who were readier to follow, than 
the Jersey Blues." They are still ready, as in times past, to 
do battle for the Constitution, and for the Union under that 
Constitution; but there is a growing sentiment, not only 
among our loyal soldiery in the field, but amongst our loyal 
citizens at home, that, in your emancipation schemes, you, 
negro brigade bills, your arbitrary arrests, and the thousand 
and one abnormal acts of this unprincipled Administration, 
3^ou have made a wide departure from the course on which 
you first started. They began to believe, in the forcible lan- 
guage of my colleague, that the Government is proving 
traitor to its organic law. 

Mr. Ten Eyck. Will my colleague permit me to explain 
a moment ? 

Mr. Wall. Certainly, sir. 

Mr. Ten Eyck. I hope ray colleague does not wish to con- 
vey the idea that I ever said that the Government had proved 
traitor to its organic law. 

Mr. Wall. Certainly not. I understand perfectly what 
m}' colleague meant by the expression in his resolution. He 
meant to convey the idea that the Government could not 
violate the very law of its being, the Constitution, without 
committing treason. In other words, that our nationality 
was in our Constitution ; destroy that, and our nationality 
is destroyed. If the departments of the Government, or 
any of the departments, assume power not belonging to th» 



Constitution, that department or those departmenta have 
committed treason against the organic law. In this myself 
and my colleague must agree in toto ccelo, or else he has 
changed his views since he offered this resolution. 

But to come hack from this digression. The loyal sol- 
diers in the field, our loyal citizens at home, are beginning 
to doubt whether Congress and the Administration were 
sincere at the outset, with all their resolutions and pledges. 
They begin to believe that you are paltering with them in a 
double sense, and only keeping the word of promise to their 
oar to break it to ///c/r hope. You tell them, by solemn res- 
olution and set speech, that this war is to be waged for the 
purpose of maintaining the Constitution within the Union ; 
and yet you are continually proposing and encouraging 
nieasures, here and elsewhere, that not only strike at the 
integrity of the Constitution, but which, if carried out, will 
seriously endanger, if it does not overthrow, the Union it- 
self. You tell 3'our soldiery that they are fighting for a 
nationality, while you here, by your legislation, are plotting 
measures to overthrow the Constitution, within which the 
nationality can alone exist, or bear no life. One Senator, 
during the progress of this debate, I think the Senator from 
Michigan, said, with great fervor of patriotism, that, for his 
part, he was tired of hearing on this floor about violating 
the Constitution. If he could save the Government, it 
mattered not how many provisions of the Constitution are 
violated. TJliat Senator evidently belongs to the Sir Boyle 
Roche school of patriots, who said, in the Irish Parliament, 
" That he was in favor of sacrificing the whole of the Con- 
stitution, if he could thereby save the remainder!" When 
the Senator sacrifices the Constitution to save the Govern- 
ment, he will find little left worth saving. 



We want, as some one Las well expressed it, here at the 
North, now more especially — loyalty not to a man, or a 
party, but to the Constitution and the laws. "We want a 
public sentiment as to the duty of citizens — a stern public 
judgment as to that class of men, who, if ruin is before us, 
are the ruiners. "We want a public indignation as to the 
men, who, from the caucuses of the bar-room, up to the cau- 
cuses of Senates and Cabinets, " sit in dark council, hatch- 
ing the cockatrice's egg, and weaving the spider's web." 
The hour for loyalty to men is past; the hour for loyalty, 
with more devotion than ever, to the Constitution and those 
great eternal principles of justice that are self-evident to the 
mind of every honest man, has come. If we are false to 
such principles now among ourselves, where are we to find 
the strength to resist our foes from without? With disloy- 
alty to the Constitution and the laws animating every act in 
our public councils, under the insane plea of necessity, you 
have introduced a foe into the midst of the citadel, more ter- 
rible than an army with banners marching to destroy. There 
are no forces in the territory in revolt against you this day 
more dangerous and more potent for mischief, than this ter- 
rible foe, that the Administration, by its insane policy, has 
encouraged and strengthened. And "my ear is pained and 
soul made sick," by the iteration and reiteration of this word 
disloyalty, as applied to Senators on this side of the Cham- 
ber and the policy they consider it their duty to support. 
It would seem as if, with the other side, loyalty meant blind 
submission to insane abnormal decrees; and if the Admin- 
istration chooses to adopt a policy for putting down this re- 
bellion, no matter how unconstitutional, how detrimental to 
the public safety, how subversive of the integrity of our 
State governments, that we, on this side of the Chamber, 



9 

are to give it our unanimous support, or else to be branded 
as disloyal and in sympathy U'ith treason. It is liigli time 
this thing ceased. jSTo man has a right to arraign my fealty, 
my loyalty to the Government under v^hichllive, upon such 
flimsy grounds as these. I consider such a charge as equiv- 
alent to arraigning my veracity under oath, and will deal 
with any man who does it, as one who is my enemy. I am 
sworn, and have been many times, to support the Constitu- 
tion and the laws of my country, and I have been ever true 
to the duties and obligations such oaths impose on every* 
man. When I swerve from their observance, let me be ar- 
raigned, and those who act with me ; and not before. I be- 
lieve, as Junius did of the English Constitution, in reference 
to our own, "That the dearest interests of this country are 
its laws and its Constitution. Against every attack upon 
these, there will, I hope, be always found amongst us the 
firmest spirit of resistance, superior to the united efforts of 
faction and ambition ; for ambition, though it does not al- 
ways take the lead of faction, will be sure in the end to take 
the most fatal adv^antage of it, and draw it to its own pur- 
poses." 

This was the language of a patriotic Englishman, who ap- 
pealed, in such stirring words as these, to his countryme'n, 
when their liberties were threatened by the assaults of arbi- 
trary language. The noble sentiments it emljodies nuist be 
the sentiments of every patriotic heart; and the man and 
the party that responds not to them, are traitorous to the 
best interests of a common country. 

This bill, so strenuously supported by the Senator from 
Missouri, and the Tiepublican Senators, on this floor, I look 
upon as one among the most glaring of the unconstitutional 
measures that, with strange fatuity and singular indifference 



10 

to results, Republican Senators are attempting to fasten 
upon tbe country. You pledged in the early part of tlie 
war, most solemnly, that each State should be allowed to 
enjoy its own domestic institutions in its own way ; and here 
you are striking a blow at the domestic institutions of Mis- 
souri, by [)roposing a plan of emancipation, when you know 
hardly one-third of those interested in the question can be 
allowed to vote, and wdiere, I suppose, emancipation may be 
decreed to the sound of the trumpet, and at the point of 
the baj'onet; and, not content with that, you want to tax 
tbe capital and tlie labor of the other States, to the amount 
of millions, in order to defray the expenses of j'our new- 
fangled scheme. Why, Mr. President, you have no more 
right to interfere in this way than 3'ou would to appropriate 
the moneys of the Federal (Jovernment to pay for the ex- 
penses of divorce suits in Missouri. You can no more take 
those moneys to pa3' the expenses of a dissolution of the 
bonds of matrimony between husband and wife, than be- 
tween master and slave. We are old-fashioned enough to 
believe in jSTew Jersey that the States under the Constitution 
are perfecth- independent of each other, as regards their 
domestic concerns, and that the Federal Government has no 
ppwer to thrust itself, either in this way or any other, into 
their domestic affairs, which they should be lei t to regulate 
in their own way. The fact is, sir, such interference as this 
is dangerous, and ought to be scrupulously watched. It is 
only one of a series of measures to make the States moi'e 
subservient and dependent upon the General Govei'iiment, 
gradually paving the way to a grand central consolidated 
despotism. It does seem to me, sir, and I say it with the 
apprehension of a patriot, in looking over the acts of the 
last and present Congress, and the pronunciamentos of that 



11 

embodiment of the war power at the other end of the ave- 
nue, that there is an awful squinting that way already. We 
are rapidly losing sight of the ancient landmarks out fathers 
set up, and fast drifting, without chart or compass, into the 
vast whirlpool of centralization. 

It was a difficult problem the framers of our institutions 
had to solve in adjusting the balance of power between the 
State and Federal Governments, With a vast majority of 
the men of that day there was a paramount desire to guard 
the sovereignty of the States, and by no means to arm the 
hands of Federal functionaries with any pretext for inter- 
fering with the proper* subjects for State legislation. They 
solved the problem, and so adjusted the relations that there 
can be no excuse for men professing to be statesmen not to 
know where the poise is. But to listen to Senators on this 
floor, one would suppose that this Government of ours was 
some great central sovereignty, which, Colossus like, be- 
■tridos the continent, and beneath which the States aro 
sometimes invited to seek shelter for their violated rights 
and insulted dignity. This was the old obnoxious Federal 
doctrine, 'and it has been revived in our day with accessions 
that even the centralizers of John Adams' day would shrink 
from. The men in power now w'ould sink the States to the 
level of mere municipal divisions of the incorporated whole, 
carried on by the will and pleasure of the whole, and liable 
to be absorl)ed by it. Push this principle to its extremity, 
and it does away with all the rules of construction deduced 
from the federative character of our institutions. It thus 
supplies the great desideratum of centralism — a perfect 
foundation for all the arguments in favor of implied, con- 
structive, and discretionary powers. Here, then, is the i)lace 
"where the wild fig-trees join the wall of Troy," and hero 



12 

it is, upon all such bills, and to such that are kindred to it, 
that those who would defend the palladium of constitutional 
State Rights, must meet the foe, and drive him back, if it 
is not even now too late. If we must perish, let us perish 
together, and they who survive must tight to the last, for 
there is no Latium for us to Hy to. 

But aside from the unconstitutionality of the bill, which 
I have not attempted to argue, for its supporters virtually 
give up this point by urging it upon the grounds of expe- 
diency and necessity, the people of New Jersey are opposed 
to this bill on the ground of its inexpediency. They can- 
not, sir, see either the wisdom or tlfe expediency, nor, per- 
mit me to say, the statesmanship, when the foundations of 
the Government are rocking as with the throes of an earth- 
quake, and the Government is staggering like a drunken 
man beneath a financial pressure that may bury us all in 
hopeless bankruptcy, — they cannot see, I say, the wisdom, 
expediency, or statemanship in lavishing twenty millions of 
money to gratify the whim and caprice of an abstraction, — 
for this emancipation policy is nothing more, nothing less. 
Emancipation has been tried in other countries^ and pro- 
nounced a failure. England tried it in her islands, and 
only a few years ago the London Times pronounced the 
whole scheme "a stupendous failure," and declared that 
the last state of that man, " the free black, in those islands, 
was worse than the first," and that freedom had inflicted 
more evils upon him than slavery' had ever concentrated. 
In Jamaica, to-day, the blacks are not only falling below the 
point of civilization attained daring theii" servitude, but, in 
many cases, returning to their native barbarism, and their 
worship of idols. What will be the fate of emancipated 
slaves is just as certain' as the fate of the North American 



13 

Indians, the difference being that the Indian flies from the 
civilization which destroys him, while the imitative and 
mild-tempered African clings to the civilization which as 
certainly destroys him. 

But the antagonism of races that will grow out of this 
scheme is much more formidable and destructive. From 
some of our "Western States the colored man has been 
entirely excluded. This is a wise provision, and a merciful 
one to the blacks, who come into our free States only to 
drag out a few years in some menial -employment, and then 
disiippear with their families, if they have any, leaving no 
traces behind. If history and experience teach us anything, 
it is this: that no two races, coiisituted, like the Anglo- 
Saxon and African, co-exist in a state of equality, which 
means competition. 

So long as the inferior race is in a dependent condition, 
and can claim support and protection, it remains content and 
happy, the great burden of the relation falling, in fact, upon 
the master, and not upon the slave. The moment that re- 
lation is changed, the negro, thrown upon his own resources 
and ex[)osed to the withering and blasting effects of the ine- 
radicable antipathy which exists towards all of African de- 
scent — that moment his fate is sealed. He perishes like the 
autumn leaves when comes a killing frost; and, in the course 
of a few generations, not a vestige remains to show tliat he 
ever existed. This is a truth which experience and obser- 
vation have taught us, and which could not have been taught 
in the mme manner to Mr. Jefferson and other founders of 
our Government, whose opinions are quoted in favor of the 
abolition of slaverv. That slavery was an evil some of them, 
undoubtedly asserted, but that the evil is mainly to the white, 
and that the black could never co-exist with his master in a 



14 

state of freedom, they did not know because the experiment 
had not been tried. Sufficient time has now elapsed to settle 
that question, and in a way which can leave but little doubt 
in a rational mind. The Almighty has established certain 
laws, physical and moral, upon this question, and we shall 
do well to acquiesce in them as being right, without attempt- 
ing to repeal or improve, lest unhappily we should be found 
to fight against God. 

The Senator from Iowa seems to have great faith in eman- 
cipation, and says he thinks it is the only pathway through 
which we are to reach the end of this war, and come out of 
the lurid tempest of strife into the cool and blessed shadow 
of a lasting peace. With all due deference to the honora- 
ble Senator, I would say to him that, in the excess of his pa- 
triotism, he will find that " the wish is father only to the 
thought." This is only one, I would tell the Senator, of the 
many impracticable schemes that have served to divide the 
North and unite the South. The Government is not only 
^^ -proving traitor to the organic law" to use the language of 
my colleague, the law of its being, but to the law of com- 
mon sense, in thus adopting measures which only serve to 
intensify and embitter the organized opposition now in arms 
against the Government. No nation that history gives any 
record of, carried on a civil war upon the principle of weak- 
ening its own cause while it was striving to strengthen that 
of those who were in open revolt against it. There are 
many in the community who shrewdly surmise that these 
radical measures have been suggested by Wendell Phillips, 
whose life-long services in trying to get nineteen States out 
of this Union in time of peace might fit him for the task of 
separating, finally and irrevocably, our once great and glo- 
rious Union. The let-the-Union-slide policy is still upper- 



15 

most in his mind, and, as he was received on this floor some 
time since as though he was the nation's benefactor, who 
knows bnt what the Senators on the other side of this cham- 
ber are committed to his policy ? If so, by passing tliis and 
other like bills, they are consistent with the true principles 
of their faith, and are helping to advance the terrible dogma 
of their prophet, "that a p'^.rmanently divided Union, with 
slavery in part, is better than an entire Union with slavery 
in the whole." But if their object be, as the Senator from 
Iowa says, to put down the rebellion, then all I have to say 
is, that the supporters of this Administration, in both 
branches of Congress, and the Executive head of it, at the 
other end of the avenue, are the wildest set of impractica- 
bles the world has almost ever seen. I know nothing that I 
can compare them to except those wild designers in the 
Academy of Lagado, in Gulliver's Travels. One projector 
in that grand Academy had a plan for extracting sunbeams 
from cucumbers and bottling them up to let out on the Gov- 
ernor's gardens in inclement seasons; a second," a plan for 
oalcining ice from gunpowder; another, a plan for manufac- 
turing silk out of cobwebs. And, in my humble judgment, 
you can much better extract sunbeams from cucumbers, cal- 
cine ice from gunpowder, and make silk out of cobwebs, 
than you can put down this rebellion by Emancipation Bills, 
Confiscation Acts, Negro Brigades, and the thousand and 
one schemes that originate here in this, the modern Acade- 
my of Lagndo. 

The peculiar and disastrous result of all your measures 
gave rise to that cutting sarcasm, that " Jefierson Davis was 
running two Congresses, one here and the other at Rich- 
mond." It does really seem to us loyal men on this side of 
the chamber, that you come within the category still. If 



16 

your wish is to aid the rehellioii, do it in an open manner, 
and not covertly by passing measures which, ostensibly for 
the Union, are in reality to divide and overthrow it — the 
very thing sought for by the Confederates themselves. 

Tlie President, in his annual message, declared that him- 
self, and you of this Congress, "could not escape history, 
that history would not forget you." I don't believe it will 
forget this Administration, but I fear it will be in the condi- 
tion of Lord Thurlow. Lord Thurlow was an exceedingly 
profane man, and on one occasion in the British Parlia- 
ment, in a burst of enthusiasm, exclaimed : " If I forget my 
sovereign, may my God forget me." "Forget you, my 
Lord," said the witty Charles Townsend, "he will never 
forget you ; he will see you damned first." Let the men of 
this Congress be careful that, while history does not forget 
them, it may not condemn them at the same time. 

I shall vote, sir, against any and every part of this bill, as 
I believe it to be a perfect bill of abominations, and I know 
it to be peauliarly obnoxious to the patriotic Legislature who 
gent me here, and who but reiterate the universal opinion of 
the State. 



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